ABSTRACT
The Red Army began life in 1918 as a small volunteer force of proletarians from the major urban citadels of Bolshevik power in northern and central Russia. The mass conscription of the peasantry gave rise to a number of major debates within the Bolshevik party. Most Bolsheviks viewed the peasantry as an alien force, hostile to the socialist revolution because of its "petty-bourgeois" nature. The White armies suffered similar problems of organization as they attempted to expand from their social base of 1918 into the mass peasant-conscript armies which were ultimately to decide the military struggles of 1919-20. The disintegration of the imperial army during the autumn and winter of 1917, and the absence of an adequate administrative apparatus in the countryside to enforce the conscription of the war-weary peasants, necessitated the foundation of the Red Army on volunteer principles during the early months of 1918.
